Josh

“You didn't listen to me," Lan whispered. One last lesson. The hardest. Demandred struck, and Lan saw his opening. Lan lunged forward placing Demandred's sword point against his own side and ramming himself forward onto it.
"I did not come here to win," Lan whispered, smiling. "I came here to kill you. Death is lighter than a feather."
Demandred's eyes opened wide, and he tried to pull back. Too late. Lan's sword took him straight though the throat.”
― Robert Jordan, A Memory of Light

“The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck.”
― Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions

“…the trouble with oaths of the form, death before dishonor, is that eventually, given enough time and abrasion, they separate the world into two sorts of people: the dead, and the forsworn.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

“Madness and passion have always been interchangeable. Throughout the entire western literary tradition. Madness is an abundance of existence. Madness is a way of asking difficult questions. What did he mean, the powerless tyrant king? O Fool, I shall go mad.
Maybe madness is the excess of possibility,.... And writingis about reducing possibility to ne idea, one book, one sentence, one word. Madness is a form of self-expression. It is the opposite of creativity. You cannot make anything that can be separated from yourself if you are mad. And yet, look at Rimbaud -- and your wonderful Christopher Smart. But don't harbour any romantic ideas about what it means to be mad. My language was my protection, my guarantee against madness and when there was no one to listen my language vanished along with my reader.”
― Patricia Duncker, Hallucinating Foucault